Tablets and smartphones with Windows 8 operating system will have faster boot up time than Windows 7 devices do, Microsoft said.
The company released a video on its blog which shows a system getting back to life from a cold state within two seconds flat. The system in the video uses a solid state disk (SSD) so the machine can read data faster.
“When it comes to talking about fundamentals we want to start with boot time — no feature gets talked about and measured more,” Steven Sinofsky, a Microsoft official, said in a blogpost. “We designed Windows 8 so that you shouldn’t have to boot all that often (and we are always going to work on reducing the number of required restarts due to patching running code). But when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible.”
According to research conducted by Microsoft, about 45 per cent of Windows 7 users on laptops and 42 per cent of all Windows 7 users put their machines in the sleep mode. In the sleep mode, the RAM is still powered through minimal power from the battery so the system can be restarted quickly.
Most mobile phone users leave their smartphones in the sleep state and this seems to have inspired the new boot up option in Windows 8 operating system.
The blog post says, “Qualitatively, people say they prefer to shut down because they want to have their PC completely “off” so that it uses no power — either to preserve battery life or to reduce their energy use. Hibernate mode is also a good option since it similarly has no power draw. However, it’s clearly not for everyone, since one of the other things we’ve heard is that many people want to turn their PCs on and have it be a “fresh start” rather than running all of the stuff from their previous session.”
An obvious conclusion from this research is that most users have no idea what the Hibernate option does. They want their machines to not use any power when it is shut down and Hibernate does exactly that but only one per cent of users utilise this option.